Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), born at Field Place, Sussex, and educated at University College, Oxford; his conventional upbringing made him deeply unhappy and rebellious.

In his teens he privately published a series of Gothic-horror novelettes including Zastrozzi (1810). At Oxford he dressed and behaved with provoking eccentricity, and in March 1811 was summarily expelled for circulating a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, written with his friend T. J. Hogg. He eloped to Scotland with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook and they married in Edinburgh in August 1811, though Shelley disapproved of matrimony, as well as royalty, meat-eating, and religion. Three years of nomadic existence followed. In Dublin he spoke on public platforms, and published An Address to the Irish People (1812) and Proposals for reform associations. Much of his early philosophy, both in poetry and politics, is expressed in Queen Mab (1813), which shows Shelley as the direct heir to the French and British revolutionary intellectuals of the 1790s.

In 1814 his marriage with Harriet collapsed, despite the birth of two children and the kindly intervention of Peacock. After suicidal scenes, Shelley eloped abroad with Mary Godwin (see above), together with her 15-year-old stepsister Jane ‘Claire’ Clairmont: their triangular relationship endured for the next eight years. His unfinished novella The Assassins (1814) reflects their dreamy travels through post-war France, Switzerland, and Germany, as does their combined journal, History of a Six Weeks Tour (1817). He returned to London and lived with Mary on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Here he wrote Alastor (1816), which first brought him general notice and reviews. The summer of 1816 was spent on Lake Geneva with Byron, and Shelley composed two philosophic poems much influenced by Wordsworth, the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (partly about his childhood) and ‘Monte Blanc’, a meditation on the nature of power in a Godless universe.

In the autumn of 1816 Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine. Shelley immediately married Mary and began a Chancery case for the custody of his first two children, which he lost. The experience shook him deeply, and is recalled in many verse fragments, such as the ‘Invocation to Misery’, and the cursing ‘To the Lord Chancellor’ (1817—a so-called ‘flyting’). However, friendships developed with Leigh Hunt, Keats, Hazlitt, and others of the liberal Examiner circle; while Peacock, now an intimate family confidant, drew a portrait of Shelley as Scythrop Glowry in Nightmare Abbey. In 1817 the family settled at Great Marlow where Shelley wrote his polemical ‘Hermit of Marlow’ pamphlets, and slowly composed ‘Laon and Cythna’, which was published, with alterations to avoid prosecution, as The Revolt of Islam (1818).

Harried by creditors, ill-health, and ‘social hatred’, Shelley took his household to Italy in the spring of 1818, leaving behind his sonnet ‘Ozymandias’. He stayed at Lucca, where he translated Plato's Symposium and wrote a daring essay ‘On the Manners of the Ancient Greeks’; and then at Venice and Este, where he composed ‘Julian and Maddalo’.

His domestic situation was increasingly strained. His little daughter Clara had died at Venice; his favourite son William (‘Willmouse’) died at Rome and Mary suffered a nervous breakdown. The shaken family settled in Tuscany: first outside Livorno and finally at Pisa, which became their more or less permanent home until 1822.

The twelve months from the summer of 1819 saw Shelley's major period of activity. He completed Prometheus Unbound and wrote The Mask of Anarchy; ‘ode to the West Wind’; the satirical Peter Bell The Third; his long political odes, ‘To Liberty’ and ‘To Naples’; the ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’; and the ‘Witch of Atlas’. Much of this work was inspired by news of political events, which also produced ‘Young Parson Richards’, ‘Song to the Men of England’, and ‘Sonnet: England 1819’. At the same time he composed several pure lyric pieces, including ‘To a Skylark’ and ‘The Cloud’, of dazzling metrical virtuosity; and completed The Cenci.

The quieter period at Pisa which followed (1820–1), saw him at work on a number of prose pieces: A Philosophical View of Reform (1820); the impish ‘Essay on the Devil’; and his Defence of Poetry (1821). He also wrote some of his most delicate, low-keyed, and visually suggestive short poems: ‘The Two Spirits’, ‘To the Moon’, ‘The Aziola’, and ‘Evening: Ponte Al Mare, Pisa’.

In the spring of 1821 news of the death of Keats in Rome produced Adonais. His platonic love-affair with Emilia Viviani, a beautiful 17-year-old heiress, resulted in Epipsychidion (1821).

In the winter of 1821 Byron also moved to Pisa, and a raffish circle formed round the two poets, including E. J. Trelawny, Edward and Jane Williams, and eventually Leigh Hunt. Shelley's last completed verse drama, Hellas (1822), was inspired by the Greek war of independence.

In April 1822 he moved his household to the bay of Lerici. Here he began The Triumph of Life, and he composed a number of short lyrics, some to Jane Williams, of striking melodic grace: ‘When the lamp is shattered’, and the melancholy ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’. Shelley was drowned in August 1822, in his small schooner the ‘Ariel’, together with Edward Williams and an English boatboy, on a return trip from visiting Byron and Hunt at Livorno.

His lyric powers and romantic biography have until recently obscured Shelley's most enduring qualities as a writer: his intellectual courage and originality; his hatred of oppression and injustice; and his mischievous, sometimes macabre, sense of humour. He translated from Greek (Plato and Homer), Latin (Spinoza), Spanish (Calderón), German (Goethe), Italian (Dante), and some Arabic fragments. His essays—very few published in his lifetime—are highly intelligent, his political pamphlets both angry and idealistic.

His weaknesses as a writer have always been evident: rhetorical abstraction; intellectual arrogance; and moments of intense self-pity. Among the English Romantics, he has recovered his position as an undoubted major figure: the poet of volcanic hope for a better world, of fiery aspirations shot upwards through bitter gloom.

Shelley's Letters have been edited by F. L. Jones (2 vols, 1964); the standard Life remains that by N. O. White (2 vols, 1947).